Thursday, September 30, 2010

Chapter 20: Greed is good. So is fantasy writing.

Been awhile since I last came on here. I've told myself to update every other day and, well, life got in the way. It happens.

Saw Wall Street 2. It was good. At points, even very good, though Oliver Stone is far from his heyday. Michael Douglas is still a beast, playing the ultimate evil yuppie fallen on hard times. Shia However-you-spell-his-last-name continues to land jobs in high-profile movies whose success has nothing to do with him. The flick does have a mega-happy ending that feels out of place, but by then I had enough goodwill that I didn't care.

So, new developments.

The audiobook is happening! Yay! I found a producer willing to help me record, and I'll keep updates on it every step of the way. The hardest part will be doing dialect for certain stories. To work on this, I've started listening to audiobooks of Uncle Remus tales and other folklore stories. If all works out, I'll have the CD done in time for west coast tour next spring. I've been playing around with podcasting, so I'll have some audio stuff up real soon, on this very blog.

Second edition of the book on the way. Still waiting for a corrected proof from my publisher. This version will undoubtedly be longer, since we're working on making the font a more consistent size. Creating this second edition has been a looooong process, but its finally come together.

I'm going to do a series of posts about the music I listened to while on tour. The station wagon only has a cassette player, forcing me to go prehistoric on the musical selections. Fun stuff. I think there's a video on Youtube of me and Dan McCloskey driving around listening to tunes, but I won't link it here, because in it I'm tired and blinking my eyes repeatedy like a cokehead.

Aaaand...I'm working on a collaboration with another writer. Christine Stoddard is an interdisciplinary artist who works in pretty much every genre there is. Film, photography, writing, comics, and many etceteras. A lot of her stuff is fairytale based, which of course I dig. You can check it out here: http://www.worldofchristinestoddard.com/. We're working on a project that harkens back to the old days of genre work.

If we were filmmakers it would be a double feature. If we were musicians it would be a split LP. Those two covers in the picture are two books pressed together. The Ace double novels are one of the coolest ideas in the history of genre publishing. They were all the rage in the 60s (And that cover art! Oh my God!). Christine and I plan on doing back-to-back novel-length books, for sale sometime next year. We aren't science fiction writers, so there won't be Martian men, but it will have some full-on fantasy. Its an exciting project with one caveat: funding. Right now I'm searching for artist grants. If that doesn't work, there has to be small press companies out there willing to put money behind ambitious projects.